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Suppose there is no God. This supposition implies that human life is meaningless, that there are no moral obligations and hence people can do whatever they want, and that the notions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and good and evil have no place in the universe. Erik J. Wielenberg believes this view to […]

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Did Newton “unweave the rainbow” by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says Dawkins–Newton’s unweaving is the key too much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don’t lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution […]

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No matter what we do, however kind or generous our deeds may seem, a hidden motive of selfishness lurks — or so science has claimed for years. This book, a detailed case study of scientific change, tells us differently. In Unto Others philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloan Wilson demonstrate once and for all […]

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Universes asks ‘Why does our universe exist?’ In order to answer that most fundamental of question, this author examines the philosophical as well as the scientific arguments for ‘fine tuning’; that is, the theory that the cosmos is specifically suited to produce life. The result is one of the most powerful versions of the ‘argument […]

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Spurred on not only by the quasi-scientific agenda of the so-called intelligent design theorists, who seek to prove the existence of God mathematically, but also by his personal contact with otherwise rational scientists, physicist Mark Perakh sets out to reveal the falsity of the claims of neocreationism with a thorough, carefully-detailed series of arguments aimed […]

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Noted Indian writer and polymath Ram Swarup explores the meaning of Islam through the words of the Sahih Muslim, considered by Muslims to be one of the most authoritative of the collections of “traditions” (Arabic Hadith) about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Like the Koran, these traditions are believed to be divinely revealed by […]

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Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy describes what the Vatican did–or did not do–to help Jews in Italy in World War II. Author Susan Zuccotti, who has written two other books about the Holocaust, demonstrates that little help of any kind came from Popes Pius XI and XII or their […]

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Subtitled: Eyewitness to Evolution With his new book Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution, Richard Fortey confirms his status as one of the best communicators of science around today. His hugely enjoyable previous book, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, was shortlisted for the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc science book prize, […]

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In Treatise On The Gods, Mencken takes on the history of religion from pre-history to the practice of Christianity in his own day. First published in 1930 (and revised in 1946), this book generated more controversy than any of his other books, but surprised some of Mencken’s most bitter critics with its genuine scholarship, sober […]

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Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance, it immediately convinced many of its readers and captivated the imagination of […]

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God is dead. “Died and fell into the sea. ” That’s what Raphael, a despondent angel with luminous white wings and a blinking halo, tells Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday. Soon Van Horne is chared with captaining the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso (flying the colors of the Vatican) as it tows the two-mile-long corpse […]

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The face of creationism has been through some major plastic surgery in the past decade or so. The leading proponents of “intelligent design theory” have left the ranting flat-earth types behind and found respected positions in the academic world from which to launch attacks on mainstream science. Philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock has explored […]

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This book attempts to guide people of all religious and nonreligious persuasions toward a genuine humanistic spirituality. The author writes, “Perhaps this is the soft underbelly of a book exposed to the modern world: to say that one can be happier and more valuable without a ‘beyond’ … that one can not only learn to […]

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In his exciting new book, physicist Victor J. Stenger shows how timesymmetry at the quantum level makes it possible to draw a model of underlyingreality that is simpler and more symmetric than the conventional view.This reality is timeless, with no beginning, no end, and no arrow of time.Time is indeed reversible. And in this “timeless […]

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A poetic and allegorical presentation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, translated by noted Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann.

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For those who have felt that other memetics sources were just teasers, your 20 year wait is over! Written by a scientist who independently discovered memetics when the field was less than 10% its present age, Thought Contagion explains movements ranging from Amish to Nazi, sexually transmitted beliefs to apocalyptic religion. The book earns advance […]

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This delightful collection of quotes from Jefferson establishes beyond dispute his enormous contributions to rationalism, freethought, and science. Often, what historians (and especially politicians) have done is to select those quotes that reflect conventional religiosity and beliefs. Here great care has been taken to exclude those quotes and to present, instead, Jefferson’s freethought legacy.

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Here at last is a coherent, unintimidating introduction to the challenging and fascinating landscape of Western philosophy. Written expressly for “anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them,” Think provides a sound framework for exploring the most basic themes of philosophy, and for understanding how major […]

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Book Description In Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment, Mary is confined to a black-and-white room and educated through black-and-white books and lectures on a black-and-white television. In this way, she learns everything there is to know about the physical world. If physicalism–the doctrine that everything is physical–is true, then Mary seems to know all there […]

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Written debate between William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith on the theological and atheological implications of modern cosmology.

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American suffragist and feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was also and outspoken critic of the Bible because of the many injustices against women in the scriptures. The 1870 revision of the Authorized English Version of the Bible by an all-male committee of the Church of England prompted Stanton to compile the works of many prominent […]

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Book Description From the Preface: Meanwhile we may reflect with comfort on the words of Dupuis: “There are large numbers of men so perversely minded that they will believe everything except what is recommended by sound intelligence and reason, and shrink from philosophy as the hydrophobic shrinks from water. These people will not read us, […]

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Plenty of books try to explain the origin of the universe, but despite the ascendance of the Big Bang theory, numerous details of that theory remain in flux as new observations are made and new hypotheses formed (and then confirmed or rejected). Timothy Ferris’s The Whole Shebang is an up-to-date account of the various mechanisms […]

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‘Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: “Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s […]

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Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War in the first decade of the twentieth century, The War Prayer tells of a patriotic church service held to send the town’s young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory […]

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When the Beagle sailed out of Devenport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific celebrity. Even more vitally, it was to set in motion the […]

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Here is the final collection of articles and speeches by the bestselling and world-renowned novelist, essayist, and philosopher.

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The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism contains Rand’s writings on ethics and political theory. The essay “The Objectivist Ethics” contains her most definitive statement concerning the metaphysical foundation of her ethical system. “The Ethics of Emergencies” and “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests” supplement and elaborates upon points made in this essay. In […]

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Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel’s words, “nowhere in particular”. At the same time, each of us is a particular […]